On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 10:02 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:
> I didn't say anything about pro-audio software, I've spoken about DEs
> like Gnome 3 and some distros which want to have PA installed as a
> dependency and probably don't work anymore without PA. If this is or at
> least will be the case then also the pro-audio software won't work
> anymore with those.

You seem to possess the misconception that the existence of PA on a
system is somehow in conflict with pro-audio software.

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Jan Steffens <jan.steffens@gmail.com> wrote:
> You seem to possess the misconception that the existence of PA on a
> system is somehow in conflict with pro-audio software.

It's true that professional users typically make some compromises to
have the best system for audio.
But.. not using PulseAudio isn't really a compromise, one is not
losing anything.

There are other kind of examples.
Professional musicians are not interested in battery file but in a
system with realtime preemption tuned for performance.
There is no joy in a long battery life with lots noises coming out of
the speakers... Not for most of them at least.

PulseAudio is even worse. It does not work at all for professional
sound cards and professional audio software.
What's the point to have it, since it's a complex and buggy system and
you can have exactly the same features
using alsa, jack and alsa-plugins?

Professional audio system with low latency requires other set of priorities.

Arch is filling this need as far as I see. One can set such a system
very easily.
But some care is wise to keep things simple, including not enforcing
the use of useless heavy tools.

^^^battery life

On 28-01-12 17:29, Heiko Baums wrote:

Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:09:30 +0100
schrieb Tom Gundersen<teg@jklm.no>:


Apologies for the late reply, but the length of the thread kept me off
for a while.


[...]

The different usecases of /media and /mnt are explained in the FHS
link you provided.


I don't see any difference there. Optical media contain a filesystem
and harddisks contain filesystems. Both are usually mounted
temporarily. So what's the difference?


There is actually a *HUGE* difference, but there is also some history
involved in this. I don't have links handy, but i'm sure google can help
you out here. Also, this is just my understanding of it, so YMMV.


First: harddisk were considered fixed. If they were there when the
system started up, one could mostly assume they would stay there.

Besides those "always there" blockdevices, there were also CD-ROMs with
their removable media. Since the *device* would probably stay where it
was, it was easy to create an entry in /etc/fstab for those so users
could use them and rely on where they would show up.
Some distro's chose to use /mnt as a mountpoint for CD-Roms, some others
created subdirectories below /mnt.
Despite these small differences, the general behavior was well
understood and workable.


Then came USB (and other removable) storage and the trouble began. Now
there were *devices* that would appear and disappear while the system
was still running. I think that there were a couple of solutions to
handle this situation, but no real standard.
I'm not sure how the standardization went, but it ended up with the
current /media hierarchy. No more fixed entries in /etc/fstab to allow
users to mount and use those devices, but dynamically created
mountpoints and possibly also auto-mounting.


This way the system doesn't need any info on possible storage media
beforehand, but everything is created on the fly, when needed. Quite a
nice and elegant solution, if you ask me.


With this in mind, the FHS decisions seem fairly logical:
- /mnt is used in different ways, so it's best to steer away from it
- /media is where we mount removable storage. It has not (much)
tradition behind it, so it's easy to create a new standard with it.



Hope that helps.



mvg,
Guus